The prestigious Chatham House foreign affairs think-tank hosted its third annual food security conference in London this week, with the NFU acting as a media partner following our collaborative work on the 2008 Food Futures report.
Again, the conference attracted a strong international line-up and audience, all there to debate how the world, and especially developing countries, can rise to the challenge of feeding 9 billion people by 2050 with the backdrop of a changing climate and fears about the state of the global economy.
The focus this year was very much on development - understandable since food security is primarily a concern for those countries in Africa and South East Asia where food supply is a persistent problem and where more than 1.4 billion people go hungry every day, many of them (1billion) subsistence farmers in rural areas.
Speakers focussed on the measures needed to support small scale farmers to improve productivity – better governance, infrastructure, access to inputs and know-how, technology and access to markets. Agriculture is very much seen as the most likely route to economic prosperity in many parts of the developing world, which in turn would help to overcome poverty and in turn overcome food insecurity.
However, to conventional wisdom, this laudable approach fails to recognise two things. The first is that even in the most optimistic scenario, demand for food, especially in Africa, is expected to outstrip supply due to urbanisation, population and economic growth.
That places a greater onus on trade to provide solutions, yet many potential traders such as Russia or Argentina have been quick to adopt beggar-thy-neighbour policies such as export bans.
Secondly, climate change will intensify the pressure on production in many tropical regions which would appear to put an even greater focus on production in temperate zones in the developed world.
This conventional wisdom was partially challenged by one speaker but most felt that food security must be addressed in both the developing and developed worlds.
A recent report by the International Food Policy Research Institute, revealed at the conference suggests that the 30-year decline in food prices in real terms has come to an end and that prices will rise by on average 50% between 2020-2050 and for some crops by over 100% because of climate change. This report could make for sobering reading for many politicians.
Most speakers spoke under the Chatham House rule and therefore cannot be quoted. One who was on the record was Defra Secretary of State, Caroline Spelman, making her first formal foray into the issue of food policy. One of the few to mention domestic agriculture, she recognised the need to build production capacity here in the UK as well as overseas arguing that the industry needed to be more competitive.
She talked up the economic value of the food chain to the UK economy and expressed concerns about water as a key issue going forward. On CAP reform, Spelman chided the EU Commission for its ‘timidity’ arguing that it needed to do more to encourage investment in modern techniques and technology to improve productivity and help farming contribute to economic growth.
On the downside, she appeared to express some concern about the ‘damage’ caused by greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture without necessarily recognising the improvements that have been seen. Tom Hind, NFU Head of Economics and International Affairs.
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